Chris Patten has admitted he knew about the Newsnight paedophile investigation but did not think it right to warn George Entwistle, the then director-general, about it, as to intervene would have been ‘absurd’.

But did he also have some scores to settle with the grotesquely defamed Lord McAlpine, an adversary from the wets- versus-dries battle in the Tory party of the Eighties?